Centre for Confidence and Well-being

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Carol's Blog

Carol Craig is the Centre's Chief Executive. She is author of The Scots' Crisis of Confidence, Creating Confidence: A Handbook for Professionals Working with Young People, The Tears that Made the Clyde: Well-being in Glasgow and The Great Takeover: How materialism, the media and markets now dominate our lives. Her latest book is Hiding in Plain Sight: Exploring Scotland's ill health. She is Commissioning editor for the Postcards from Scotland series. Carol blogs on confidence, well-being, inequality, every day life and some of the great challenges of our time. The views she expresses are her own unless she specifically states that they reflect the Centre's thinking.

Networking

Posted 29/04/2005

Today was the second of the Centre's network meetings. Great turn out. Great buzz. Many people went away saying that had a really inspiring and useful afternoon. As has been the case at all the events organised by the Centre there was a great deal of positive energy. I was particularly pleased at the fact that there were people there from a variety of different sectors - health, eduction, economic development, social work, business, sport, the arts and of course a range of people working as coaches and consultants. Alan McLean, a chartered psychologist with Glasgow City Council, led a great session on motivation. He works mainly with teachers yet the insights were relevant to all walks of life. One of the great things about Alan is that he is simultaneously able to make people seem very complex yet at the same time leave you with some simple messages about the importance of trust, respect, feedback and so forth.

I've been aware for some time now that there are a lot of people interested in a broad confidence agenda but the difficulty was that they were fragmented and didn't know about one another. One of the great advantages of having a Centre is that it can start to help make these connections. Events like these are a good way for people to meet and start doing things together. We also agreed that at future network meetings there will be opportunities for people to run half hour workshops on their projects or area of work. Information on how to apply to run one of these workshops will be posted on the website in the next couple of weeks.